Chargement...

A Poem for Painters

Our age bereft of nobility
       How can our faces show it?
I look for love.
       My lips stand out
dry and cracked with want
                                    of it.
                                   Oh it is well.
My poem shall show the need for it.
 
                       Again we go driven by forces
      we have no control over. Only
                                                   in the poem
     comes an image that we rule
                     the line by the pen
in the painter’s hand one foot
                             away from me.
 
                             Drawing the face
                             and its torture.
That is why no one dares tackle it.
                   Held as they are in the hands
                               of forces they
                   cannot understand.
                                                      That despair
       is on my face and shall show
       in the fine lines of any man.
 
I had love once in the palm of my hand.
See the lines there.
                                     How we played
its game, are playing now
in the bounds of white and heartless fields.
 
Fall down on my head, love,
drench my flesh in the streams
                               of fine sprays. Like
                                      French perfume
so that I light up as
                                    mountain glorys
and I am showered by the scent
                         of the finished line.
 
                                            No circles
                      but that two parallels do cross
And carry our souls and bodies
      together as the planets,
                    Showing light on the surface
                           of our skin, knowing
                    that so much of it flows through
                          the veins underneath.
                    Our cheeks puffed with it.
                          The pockets full.
 
 
                               2.
 
Pushed on by the incompletion
             of what goes before me
I hesitate before this paper
             scratching for the right words.
 
Paul Klee scratched for seven years
             on smoked glass, to develop
             his line, LaVigne says, look
at his face! he who has spent
            all night drawing mine.
 
      The sun also
rises on the rooftops, beginning
w/ violet. I begin in blue
knowing why we are cool.
 
 
                                3.
 
My middle name is Joseph and I
walk beside an ass on the way to what
Bethlehem, where a new babe is born.
 
      Not the second hand of Yeats but
      first prints on a cloudy windowpane.
 
America, you boil over
 
 
                                 4.
 
      The cauldron scalds.
      Flesh is scarred.
      Eyes shot.
 
      The street aswarm with
      vipers and heavy armed bandits.
      There are bandages on the wounds
      but blood flows unabated. The bath—
      rooms are full. Oh stop up
                                                     the drains.
                             We are run over.
 
 
                                  5.
 
Let me ramble here.
yet stay within my own yardlines.
I go out of bounds
           without defense,
oh attack.
 
 
                                   6.
 
  At last the game is over
                                            and the line lengthens.
  Let us stay with what we know.
 
That love is my strength, that
I am overpowered by it:
                                       desire
                                                 that too
is on the face: gone stale.
When green was the bed my love
and I laid down upon.
Such it is, heart’s complaint,
You hear upon a day in June.
And I see no end in view
when summer goes, as it will,
upon the roads, like singing
companions across the land.
 
Go with it man, if you must,
but leave us markers on your way.
 
South of Mission, Seattle,
over the Sierra Mountains,
the Middle West and Michigan,
moving east again, easy
coming into Chicago and
the cattle country, calling
to each other over canyons,
careful not to be caught
at night, they are still out,
the destroyers, and down
into the South, familiar land,
lush places, blue mountains
of Carolina, into Black Mountain
and you can sleep out, or
straight across into States
 
I cannot think of their names.
 
This nation is so large, like
our hands, our love it lives
with no lover, looking only
for the beloved, back home
into the heart, New York,
New England, Vermont green
mountains, and Massachusetts
my city, Boston and the sea.
Again to smell what this calm
ocean cannot tell us. The seasons.
Only the heart remembers
and records in words
of works
we lay down for those men
who can come to them.
 
 
                                    7.
 
At last. I come to the last defense.
 
My poems contain no
                     wilde beestes, no
lady of the lake music
of the spheres, or organ chants,
 
yet by these lines
I betray what little given me.
 
One needs no defense.
 
            Only the score of a man’s
            struggle to stay  with
            what is his own, what
            lies within him to do.
 
            Without which is nothing,
            for him or those who hear him
            And I come to this,
            knowing the waste, leaving
 
            the rest up to love
            and its twisted faces
            my hands claw out at
            only to draw back from the
            blood already running there.
 
            Oh come back, whatever heart
            you have left. It is my life
            you save. The poem is done.
 
6.18.58

#AmericanWriters #FreeVerse Series/Sequence

Autres oeuvres par John Wieners...



Top